Ah, this was such a nice surprise...there are two stories in this book The Terror and White Face. 

I seriously should maybe think about reading book descriptions rather than just be seduced by the pretty covers of books.

Anyway, The Terror was your typical Edgar Wallace thriller focused on madness, crime, and darkest London. To me Wallace didn't write noir as much as a special kind of Gothic crime, including damsels in distress, castles, secret passages, ... oh, and a mad monk.

Yes, the plot is silly, the characters are two-dimensional, and many of the other aspect are utterly ridiculous, but this is just the sort of crime caper one sometimes needs. So, what if it made me laugh out loud that one of the characters suffers from insanity for only exactly 2 hours every day? (Or was it 2 hours of sanity? Does it matter?)

I really liked this one. It reminded me a lot of the German screen adaptations of Wallace's work - they are hilariously, charmingly.....dated but they are great guilty pleasures.

White Face took a different approach to the "typical" Wallace story. Yes, this story is also based on organised crime at it's heart, but this one here seemed to be a lot close some of the stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. There is a great twist, but there are also elements that seems to portray some of the crimes as the characters only choice, so almost ask for sympathy from the reader. 

It was an interesting change from other works by Wallace that I am familiar with and I love that the story was included in this book (edited by Martin Edwards) but the story was also quite long and drawn out, which didn't work well for me.

(Scene from the German screen adaptation of The Terror. Unfortunately, there are not many similarities between the film and the book.)

Such is the plight of the mood reader that I've been wondering for the last hour or so which book to pick for tonight. 

I really want to start Timm's Halbschatten but I need something light and easy to switch off from work. I really also want to start A Scream in Soho, but I don't think I want to read that one as a "quick fix". 

So, I found The Terror in the vaults of my audible library, which should be an adequately entertaining story.

Oh, and incidentally, this like the disappointing Murder by Matchlight is also set in black-out London. Maybe the book gods wanted to make up for something?

by J. Esker Miller

This one is an interesting concept. Some sort of superwolf is causing havoc in a remote part of Alaska where freezing cold is part of daily life and travelling on dogsleds is common, as is looking out for polar bears. An animal expert is flown in and assigned to work out what is attacking both humans and animals, though he's been set up by the university he works for to take the trolling as a sort of Sasquach watcher.

There's a sudden flashback in history that covers several chapters, showing how the monster dogs developed and evolved. This in itself was interesting. The story then continues and the knowledge the reader has gained raises new questions about the behaviour of the dogs, who aren't actually wolves at all.

Things get dark and scary by about 40%. It occurred to me while reading this that animal Horror stories are more scary than those with totally imaginary monsters because it's just close enough to reality. As one might expect, there's substantial gore, though the author didn't get gratuitously descriptive and drag it out.

thought the ending was dragged out too long. There was a place where and ending would have been natural, but then a sort of separate adventure was added that I felt was not only unnecessary and foolish of the characters, but finished in an unsatisfying way, leaving me thinking, well what was the point of that?

Overall a gripping read, despite a couple of flaws.

by Raymond E. Feist

This one kept getting recommended and after trying a sample, I decided to give it a read. It's my first Feist and possibly my only, as sampling another of his novels didn't impress me as much.

It's a very dark story that wraps folklore, especially Irish mythology, around a modern day setting. A family buys a farmhouse with woodland attached to the property and there are local stories about the woods and some sort of sleeping evil.

What I liked was that this isn't a standard monster story with one nasty critter causing all the problems. Various otherworld entities encounter the family members, some in harmless ways and others, well, you have to read to see what happens.

The story was more sexual in parts than I expected and not always in nice ways. People really sensitive to anything suggesting rape might want to steer clear. The strange experiences are fairly subtle at first and build as the story goes along.

Another thing I liked was short chapters! It's really easy to decide to read just one more, and just one more since it's only a few pages. I got 149 pages in on the first sitting! Then towards the end found myself getting through a lot of pages without realizing as things really heated up.

The family who are central to the plot are well defined characters and some of their close associates also come across strongly as individuals. Even the twins become distinctive as their part of the story develops. At times I didn't know where the plot was going and wondered if it was just meandering or if it was setting me up for something specific, but it all came together in the last couple of hundred pages.

My one niggle is the mixing of different cultural histories and mythologies. As it happens, I recently read an academic book on Persian Zoroastrianism/Magic and crossing that over with the Illuminati in Europe and a mix of Irish/English/Germanic folklore stretched believability a little far.

Putting all that aside, I enjoyed the story and fully approve of the ending. Highly recommended for dark fantasy fans.

Anti-Terror Finance Watchdog: The Financial Action Task Force is an inter-governmental organization established in 1989 to fight money laundering, terrorist financing and other related threats to the reliability of the international financial system. The FATF comprises 39 members including two regional organisations, the European Commission and Gulf Cooperation Council. India is a member of the FATF consultations and its Asia Pacific Group. The FATF (Financial Action Task Force) on Monday (17.02.2020) said several terrorist groups are being benefitted from funds raised through illegal activities and from supporters worldwide in spite of the international terror financing watchdog tightening the standards on flow of money.

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